It's Time for Conservatives And the Tea Party to Start Playing Chess

Numbers are slowly emerging, and they aren’t good for the president’s “signature piece of legislation.” The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, has been an unmitigated disaster. After three years and $634 million, healthcare.gov has proven itself unable to handle even the traffic a local supermarket website would get. In other words, it’s not a problem of too much traffic crashing servers, the problems lie in the code itself.

Just like the problems with the website, the flaws in the program itself are structural. And this fact, provided they don’t screw it up, will be the greatest asset of Republicans going forward.

The president and Democrats have been playing chess while Republicans have been playing checkers. Progressives have shown a disinterest delaying Obamacare for a year and a willingness to harm anyone, from kids with cancer to veterans of all ages, to protect this government power grab. Let ‘em have it.

I realize that’s a controversial statement to make and opens me up to calls of “SQUISH,” but hear me out.

Obamacare enrollment has, by all accounts, been anemic. For the plan to stand a chance of surviving it needs at least 7 million enrollees, but is on pace for about a quarter of that, if the numbers leaked so far hold up. With so few enrollees, the plan is unworkable. Older and less healthy Americans are most likely to sign up, and no insurance market can survive if only those who will have more in claims than they pay in premiums sign up.

Just as no car insurance company could survive if only drivers sign up who wrap a car around a telephone pole every week per week, no health insurance plan can survive if only those likely to need health care sign up.

The structural flaws of Obamacare are in its conception. The progressive architects of the ACA worked under the delusion that everyone without health insurance wants health insurance. That’s simply not true.

A quarter of Americans without health insurance before Obamacare made more than $50,000 per year. Were they bothered by their lack of insurance, they could have remedied it. They didn’t.

They’re young, and young people labor under the delusion they are “10 feet tall and bullet proof.” They’re willing to risk going without because they’d rather have the money in their pockets. And, to be honest, the statistics are on their side.